Van Dorn’s Wild Ride

On Dec. 20, 1862, the cold, clear morning air in the Union-occupied north Mississippi town of Holly Springs rang with shots, the clang of sabers and rebel yells. The streets filled with cheering Southern civilians, surrendering Northern soldiers and wheeling Confederate cavalrymen, who had charged so hard into the town, one trooper recalled, that their horses were “hot and smoking.” Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s efforts to take Vicksburg would go up in the flames of the supplies that the rebels were preparing to burn. All this was happening at the hand of a disgraced, and often disgraceful, man: Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn.

In late November, Vicksburg was all that connected the Trans-Mississippi region – that is, the territory west of the river — to the rest of the Confederacy. Grant had decided to take it by marching his main force from Tennessee down the Mississippi Central rail line to Grenada, 60 miles north of the town. A force led by Gen. William T. Sherman would sail from Memphis down the Mississippi, then up the Yazoo River, disembarking northeast of the city. If the Confederates moved up to meet Grant, Sherman would attack Vicksburg. If not, Grant would swing down to attack the city’s vulnerable rear.

Mid-December found Grant’s plan proceeding smoothly. His headquarters were at Oxford, 50 miles inside Mississippi, and he had assembled a huge supply depot at nearby Holly Springs for the next stage of his operations.

But Grant, for once, had underestimated his foe. The Confederacy was desperate to hang on to Vicksburg, and Van Dorn was equally keen to salvage his reputation by helping to defend it.

Van Dorn certainly appeared the beau ideal of a military figure — one admirer said he “was a knightly fellow to look at” — but thus far he hadn’t fought like one. After minor successes in Texas and undistinguished service in Virginia, Van Dorn had been sent to northern Arkansas as a district commander. From there he intended to march on St. Louis, but instead was thoroughly beaten in March 1862 at the Battle of Elkhorn Tavern.

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The dashing model of a cavalier remained undaunted. “I was not defeated,” Van Dorn asserted, flouting both the facts and linguistic consistency, “but only failed in my intentions.”

On June 19, Jefferson Davis appointed Van Dorn head of the Department of Southern Mississippi and East Louisiana. His task, in cooperation with Sterling Price’s Army of the West, was to keep Union forces in west Tennessee busy during Gen. Braxton Bragg’s campaign elsewhere in the state. Davis also impressed upon Van Dorn the necessity of protecting Vicksburg. Van Dorn pledged to defend the city to the death.

But Van Dorn was an aggressive fighter, and this meant he would not, could not, long maintain a purely defensive posture. By early autumn he joined with Price and set off in pursuit of the Yankees in northern Mississippi. The results were disastrous. At Iuka on Sept. 19, Price’s army was lucky to escape from a two-pronged Union assault. Then, at Corinth in early October, Van Dorn’s forces were mangled in two days of savage fighting, suffering a casualty rate of over 20 percent.

The debacle at Corinth ended Van Dorn’s time as commander of the department. He was humiliated on Oct. 12, when Davis replaced him but required that he stay on as a subordinate to the new commander, John C. Pemberton. Van Dorn’s dismal position worsened after wide-ranging charges of personal and professional misconduct emerged. A subordinate claimed that Van Dorn “did utterly fail and neglect to discharge his duties” at Corinth. There were also persistent rumors of womanizing (he had fathered three illegitimate children in Texas before the war) and drunkenness. Van Dorn furiously demanded a court of inquiry, which after lengthy proceedings cleared him of all charges in November.

Van Dorn paid for a thousand copies of the court’s findings to be distributed across the South, but not all were convinced of his innocence. Mississippi was “dense with narratives of his negligence, whoring, and drunkenness,” Senator James Phelan wrote to President Davis in early December. Van Dorn’s reputation in his home state was so bad that “an acquittal by a court-martial of angels would not relieve him of the charge.”

Van Dorn wrote his own letter to Davis. In it he was both contrite and defiant. “I have never had intercourse with any woman … who was not alike accessible to others,” he claimed, addressing rumors of adultery. He was “unfortunately not a good Christian,” he admitted, and guilty of “indiscretions, thoughtlessness and folly — or pleasantries, as they may be called.” Nevertheless, he declared, “I am not a Seducer, nor a drunkard.” Van Dorn felt himself so abused by his fellow Mississippians that he requested a post elsewhere.

He was lucky Davis refused him. In early December, Lt. Col. John S. Griffith, who commanded a cavalry brigade under Van Dorn, suggested, in a letter to Pemberton, a raid into the Union rear, and asked that Van Dorn lead it. After hesitating, Pemberton agreed and put Van Dorn in charge of three cavalry brigades, totaling 3,500 men, who despite Van Dorn’s tarnished reputation roared in welcome when he joined them on Dec. 16.

The raiders left Grenada and headed east, away from Holly Springs, which lay to the north. A long, hard ride brought them to Houston, Miss.; after a brief rest, Van Dorn turned due north and rode on, arriving on Dec. 18 at Pontotoc. The troopers were met with what one called “extravagant demonstrations of joy,” but Van Dorn was determined to press northward, despite bad weather and worse roads.

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At this point a small Union cavalry detachment discovered his presence. Messages were sent to Grant in nearby Oxford, but unaccountably they didn’t arrive until the next morning. Grant immediately dispatched warnings to Union commanders across northern Mississippi.

But Van Dorn had changed direction once more, and now was heading west toward Holly Springs. Despite Grant’s orders to keep a sharp lookout, Col. Robert C. Murphy, the garrison commander, failed to warn his troops or even require his officers to be with their men. Most of them slept that night in the homes of private citizens.

Van Dorn’s troopers would remember with fervent admiration his appearance as dawn arose on Dec. 20 and they waited with him just outside the town. “Seated on his fine black mare, holding his hat above his head,” one recounted, “I thought him as fine a figure as I had ever seen.” Colonel Griffith, whose plan Van Dorn had executed to perfection, wrote that “I felt as if I could charge hell and capture the devil.”

Confederate cavalry poured through several paths into the town, catching the Federals almost entirely unaware. Only a small contingent of Union cavalry on the northern outskirts was able to offer organized resistance, putting up what the rebels described as “a sharp little fight” before escaping.

Colonel Murphy wasn’t so fortunate. He, probably still in his nightshirt, and hundreds of Union soldiers were rounded up by Van Dorn’s men. Because he had neither the means nor the inclination to take them prisoner, though, Van Dorn quickly paroled the Yankees and then set about the real purpose of the raid: the destruction of Grant’s supplies for the assault on Vicksburg.

The rebel troopers took what clothes, food, horses and weaponry they could carry off, but a vast majority of what they found at Holly Springs was destroyed. They set fire to long strings of boxcars filled with Union supplies, as well as several buildings in the town crammed with food, medicine, arms and ammunition. In seven hours, all told, Van Dorn destroyed about $1.5 million worth of property.

He also wrecked Grant’s campaign. The Union general’s forward supply base was now gone, and recent cavalry attacks by Nathan Bedford Forrest on the rail and communication lines to his rear meant it couldn’t be rebuilt anytime soon. Grant had no choice but to return to southwestern Tennessee. On Dec. 26, Sherman’s attack went ahead anyway, but it was decisively repulsed at Chickasaw Bayou.

As 1863 came in, Vicksburg was safe and Van Dorn’s fortunes were rising. By April he commanded an entire corps of cavalry in the Army of the Tennessee. But on May 7, a week after Grant started to move once more against the city Van Dorn had saved, Van Dorn was killed, shot in the back of the head by a man who claimed that the general was involved with his wife.

It’s true that Van Dorn was enormously attractive to many women — one memoirist wrote that “his bearing attracted, his address delighted, his accomplishments made women worship him” — but in this case, ironically, the charge of immorality was almost surely false. Shot down from behind while writing at his desk was a particularly ignominious end for Van Dorn, given his passion and courage, however flawed he might have otherwise been. “To this day his ghost must weep,” writes one contemporary historian, because “he should have died leading a cavalry charge.”

Sources: Brandon H. Beck, “Holly Springs: Van Dorn, the CSS Arkansas, and the Raid That Saved Vicksburg”; Stephen Berry, “Casualties of War: General Earl Van Dorn,” The Civil War Monitor, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Winter 2011); Jack D. Coombes, “Thunder Along the Mississippi: The River Battles That Split the Confederacy”; Ulysses S. Grant, “Personal Memoirs”; Robert G. Hartje, “Van Dorn: The Life and Times of a Confederate General”; William L. Shea and Terrence J. Winschel, “Vicksburg Is the Key: The Struggle for the Mississippi River”; The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Vol. 17, Parts 1 and 2.

Thom Bassett is writing a novel about William Tecumseh Sherman. He lives in Providence, R.I., and teaches at Bryant University.

Correction: December 24, 2012This article originally stated that General Sherman's forces were to sail up the Yazoo River and disembark northwest of Vicksburg, Miss., instead of northeast.

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